The Politics of Domestic Consumption

Critical Readings

Stevi Jackson, Shaun Moores

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317903642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This Reader brings together a broad range of critical work on on the everday practices and power relations of domestic consumption -drawing on material from sociology, women's studies and media and cultural studies. The book is divided into five main sections - on economics, food and clothing, leisure and media reception, household technologies, and the construction of home - and its selected contributions examine the social dynamics of gender: generation, class and ethnicity.

1

The Economics of Domestic Consumption

1.1

Christine Delphy

In challenging the dominant conceptualization of families as units of consumption, Christine Delphy contends that domestic consumption is neither unitary nor undifferentiated. Her use of food as an illustrative example anticipates material in the next section of our reader, but it is her theoretical position which is of primary importance here: the argument that families are based fundamentally upon relations of economic power and exploitation. She wrote this essay in the early 1970s.

Sharing the same table: consumption and the family

If there is one universally recognized function of the family it is ‘consumption’. It would be tedious to list all the books and articles which mention this, because there is no sociologist, and more generally no author dealing with the family, who does not at least allude to it. It is presented as one of the principal functions of ‘the modern family’.

If it is granted that the family is the institution (or one of the institutions) which fulfils this function, we might have expected that the next step would have been to study the ways in which the family satisfies what are undoubtedly seen as some basic biological needs of its individual members. But despite the social and theoretical importance of both the family and the ‘function’ of consumption, there is a strikingly poor literature on the topic. Not a single known study of the family takes consumption as its theme of research, or even sets out the ground for such research.

If consumption and the family were not the object of specific investigations, we might at least have expected to see it discussed in general theoretical introductions. But, after its obligatory and quasi-ritual mention, it is little developed. Indeed, the assertion of the existence of a consumption function is often put in the form of a negatively phrased sentence. That is to say, the function of consumption is presented as the only remaining function of the family within the economic order: what remains to it of a glorious past, of the global economic role it used to play. Its mention is an integral part of the – often advanced, never substantiated – thesis that the family in general (and not certain forms of the family) has recently been excluded from any role in production whatsoever (and not only from production for the market). It is as if consumption was put forward to give credit to the thesis of the loss of the family’s role in production, and at the same time to affirm that – despite this vicissitude – the family continues to be necessary within the economic order. Hence, even at a theoretical level, the function of consumption is not treated in and of itself by those who study the family. E. M. Duvall’s sentence¹ ‘Families have shifted from production to consumption’ is exemplary of this kind of thinking. It is considered only in a general historical perspective: from the point of view of the evolution of the family and its gains and losses of ‘functionality’.

When we look at past work on family consumption, it rapidly becomes clear that the term ‘consumption’ is used to designate market demand. The titles of articles and journals lead us to think that what is being studied is individual consumption, but the consumption they describe is not that of any actual person, but is rather the purchase of goods and services on the market by households (generally in the person of the housewife). Such studies let it be thought that the family, which is a collective agent on the market, is equally a collective agent in consumption.² An INSEE study (the French equivalent of the Government Social Survey’s Family Expenditure Survey) says explicitly:

The field covered by this enquiry is that of expenditure on goods and services: purchase of products, consumption taking place outside the home, and payment for loans and services.

It is clear here that all consumption by members of the household (and this includes children at boarding school for instance), wherever it occurs, is taken into account in evaluating the standard of living of households.

Thus the use of the term consumption implies that individual consumption is being studied, while the way in which consumption is observed in practice – the relating of all consumption to the household – requires that distribution within the family should be studied. But not only do studies of individual consumption or sharing within the family not exist, the themes are not so much as broached, even theoretically, and it is precisely the choice of the household as the unit of observation which prevents such studies being possible using existing data. Taking the family as a unit does not allow family consumption to be studied – only the consumption of aggregates of families. What is studied is no longer the families themselves, but the way in which they differ from each other, or form groups. Moreover, the only difference between families which these studies are explicitly interested in studying, is that of ‘the comparative standard of living of different socio-economic groups.’³

This comparison itself actually also suffers from the definition of the household, e.g. servants (waged and apprenticed) lodging in a household are held to be part of it from the point of view of consumption. The result is that studies of the standard of living of farm workers’ households, for example, do not include those who lodge with – and who are consequently trapped by – the household of their boss. And these are those whose standard of living is lowest. Excluding them from farm workers’ households has the effect of raising the average standard of living of the latter, while their being ‘captive’ has the effect of lowering the average standard of living of the households to which they are attached, i.e. those of the class of their masters. These two effects together lead to a not inconsiderable diminution of the economic distance between the two classes.

But distortions brought about in comparisons of social categories are a minor defect compared to the major sin of considering the very place – the household – where certain class relations are exercised (e.g. those of servant and master) as the place where they are annulled.

The absence of studies of distribution has a positive meaning. It means that the only pertinent perspective is how the family is a unit within a larger whole, because this is the only perspective considered. Above all, it lets it be thought that the family, a unity vis-à-vis the outside, is also one within itself. One of the images which the term ‘unit of consumption’ evokes is that of common – i.e. homogeneous – consumption. It connotes at one and the same time common consumption, and undifferentiated consumption.

Differences of consumption within families

However, such connotations of common and undifferentiated consumption are contradicted by the facts of everyday experience. Here the disparities of consumption between family members are not only visible, but recognized as constitutive of family structure. Differences in consumption are seen as correlated with the existence of different family statuses. Differential consumption plays a major role both in the perception of these statuses by outsiders and in the appreciation of their particular statuses by those involved.

Existing studies of consumption are, however, based on the opposite assumption. And they do not rest content with ignoring individual consumption: they pretend to know about it without having studied it. Thus:

The average annual consumption per head… is obtained simply [sic] by dividing the values entered in the table … by the number of persons.⁴

It should be remembered, however, that among the individuals whom we are thus invited to consider as benefiting in equal shares from all the goods consumed in the household to which they are attributed, are not only children in boarding schools, and soldiers on military service, but also servants, waged employees and apprentices. Thus, while pretending to ignore the whole topic, existing studies of consumption in fact assume (impose) a theory of distribution – an egalitarian theory.

It is likely that the processes described above are no chance effects and that their convergence is no coincidence. The use of the term ‘unit of consumption’ – which in denoting a simple unit of reckoning connotes a unitas (union and communion) – tends to make the study of distribution seem pointless; and statistical practice, for its part, by always taking the household as the only unit of observation, makes any empirical research impossible. All these processes converge to prevent any study of real distribution, for on the one hand such a study would risk undermining the whole basis of existing research by showing it to be founded on an implicit postulate – that of egalitarian distribution; while on the other hand it could not but confirm what is apprehended impressionistically by everyday experience – the existence of differential consumption.⁵

Study of the consumption function of the family should consist of studying the role of the family as the distribution centre for its members, and research should take as its object the effect of family status on individual consumption. But, as has been noted above, not one of the studies which refers to the family as a unit of consumption so much as outlines the limits of what does or does not enter into this unit, so the very framework of the research has still to be defined. Does individual consumption within the family involve consumption effected collectively, with all the members of the family present, regardless of place? Or is it consumption that occurs at home, whichever members may be present? Or is it consumption by members of the family, whatever the place and whichever individuals are present? Among the criteria which could be envisaged, besides the place (at home or outside) and the presence or absence of the family as a collective, must be the nature of the consumption. Would specific consumption (e.g. connected with a job) be opposed to common consumption, or consumption of the same sort of thing (e.g. consumption of food) – these latter alone being considered familial?

If the subject of research is the role of the family as a distribution point, it seems obvious that all individual consumption should be considered as familial since it is based on the status of the individual in the family whatever the place, the modalities, or the form it may take. But in the absence of even elementary reflections and investigation in this area we must proceed empirically and cautiously. In fact it is much more a matter of using examples to set out the directing hypothesis for a new approach to family consumption than of stating the methodological outlines for a systematic study.

I shall try to set out the outlines of such an approach in the remainder of this article, using examples chosen from the area of non-specific consumption, effected mainly at home, even if not in the presence of the whole family, since such consumption, and particularly the consumption of food, is the most evidently familial. It is the family seated around the table which most approximates the image of a really communist community, of a really equitable distribution, and which seems most sheltered from the effects of hierarchy.

I shall also deal with families on very low incomes, since there is a sentiment that inequality is less cruel when it is a case of individuals getting more or less of what is already a surplus, rather than when it is a question of individuals getting more or less than the minimum needed for a healthy life. It tends to be thought that families on the breadline must and do share what little they have.⁶

Both experts and the uninitiated like to situate the western version of ‘subsistence’ within rural, and above all within peasant, families. Here production for self-consumption is relatively important compared to that destined for the market, and this suggests a self-sufficiency, especially in food, which though far from existing in reality, is close to the golden age of the popular imagination (which is curiously situated in the nineteenth century).

It is in this type of family that some of the lowest incomes within industrial society are to be found and here that the standard of living is at its lowest. It is also here that it is most recognized that all family members do hard physical work. It is thus the last place where one would expect to find differential consumption of food. Therefore, if it can be shown that such differential consumption does exist, there seem good grounds for expecting it to exist in all families: that it is part and parcel of the structure of the family. That is to say, the stress given here to the rural family, and to the consumption of food, is not due to a particular interest in these areas as such, but rather to a belief that once the fact of differential consumption is established and established here (for the reasons evoked above), it will require further research into its principles and functioning, i.e. its existence as an institution. It will involve, in sum, the freeing of a problematic which will allow us to return to new concrete studies since future research will no longer be aimless: its problematic will have been constructed.

The distribution of food in peasant families

There is, needless to say, no scientifically collected information which can be used in considering whether there is or is not differential consumption in poor farm families. On the contrary, so called scientific data have been collected in just such a way as to mask it. But, as was said earlier, the point of this essay is not to present new facts, but to look at facts, which are universally known to the social actors, from a new angle.⁷ So I shall therefore draw on descriptive studies and personal knowledge.

In the traditional rural family (of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and still today in marginal family smallholdings of the type that predominate in south-west France and much of southern Europe), consumption of food varies greatly according to the individual’s status in the family. This variation concerns the quantity of food and sets apart primarily children and adults, and women and men. But among the adults the old eat less than those who are mature, and the junior members eat less than the head of the family. It is he who takes the biggest pieces. He also takes the best: variation concerns quality as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1: The Economics of Domestic Consumption
• 2: The Significance of Food and Clothing in Family Life
• 3: The Power Relations of Leisure and Media Reception
• 4: The Uses and Interpretations of Household Technologies
• 5: The Cultural Construction of Home
• Sources and Acknowledgements
• Index